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Senior RIKEN Scientist Involved In Stem Cell Scandal Commits Suicide
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Yoshiki Sasai, a noted stem cell scientist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, who co-authored two controversial and later retracted papers that reported a simple way of reprogramming mature cells, was confirmed dead this morning, an apparent suicide. Local media reported he was found hanging from a stairway railing in the RIKEN complex in Kobe. Sasai was rushed to a nearby hospital but efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. He reportedly left a suicide note, but it has not been made public."
0) Labs around the world are researching patentable stem-cell cures at their own expense.
1) Group finds (comparatively) trivial way to produce them and releases said on the internet, encouraging others to try.
2) [Insert unknown]
3) Research is discredited, careers ruined, and dude is dead.
Is '2' something like "research is totally false and harms science itself by its very existence so the villains must be crushed" or more like "research is close enough to scare the shit out of some heavily-invested peers"?
Whichever one it winds up being, the response to 'crappy scientific paper' is NOT typically burning at the stake, so some unknown must be at work here.
It is Japan. People kill themselves on a daily basis there. It is practically a national hobby. This is a clear case of 'shamefuru dispuray'.
Fetal stem cells. FETAL.
F E T A L
That is spelled
F
E
T
A
L
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Except his research was on using adult stem cells, so it is unlikely he would have triggered the angst of religious or abortion groups.
Not everyone bothers with these distinctions. To say that the debate is one rife with ignorance is to master the skill of understatement.
Religious people were against stem cells from aborted fetuses because they considered it murder. There is nothing hard to understand about this.
Therefore, a way to do this with adult (or any non-abortion-based cells) would be hailed by the religious.
You should learn what people claim before drawing conclusions. As with the Hobby Lobby argument, stopping implantation might not technically be an "abortion", but it is killing a viable embryo nevertheless, "ensouled", so to speak. People stop being facetious.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If you ask me about it, one of the most important things when getting killed is the awareness part. As in, if you have to kill me, please do it in my sleep, so that I go to sleep but never wake up. Every time I wake up it's a new surprise. So if you have to kill an embryo, you should do it before it's aware, before it develops a functioning brain and senses, like a skin that can sense heartbeat or motions. By the way it's easy to step back and just reject all embryonic research, but had you had the chance to walk in Christopher Reeds shoes, you might have ended up being a big fan too or stem cell research, as the only way to live your life normally again, at the expense of killing an unconscious, unborn embryo, who was never meant to be born in the first place, but created for stem cells. People kill each other all over the world, sometimes with the blessing of the highest of the highest powers. Such as Bin Ladin, watched by the whole White House while it was going down. You say he committed a crime, but a child is born innocent. And you would be right. But innocent was a cow that sits as steak on your plate, with more conscience and life "wasted" than an embryo of a few cells. I don't have a problem flushing sperm, potential for life down the toilet. And neither do women flushing eggs from periods. Not every potential egg has to turn into a child. So we're wasting all the reproductive capacity, potential for human life, as a custom, and we're wasting live creatures with eyes, ears and brains, for meat on our plates, but we're not willing to waste a few undifferentiated embryonic cells to fix somebody in a wheelchair? It's complicated, I know it's complicated. That's why I'm happy I don't have to deal with it, and let other people do it. That's how I deal with meat, I'll eat it, but I let other people do the killing. Makes me feel less guilty.